The real issue here is that the sales guys want to be secretive for their pricing for two reasons. 1) They think that if only they could talk to me and convince me that I need their product no matter what, I'll buy it. 99.9% of the time they don't understand how I am using the product and add no value - they just want to make the sale and will say anything to get the sale. 2) They sometimes think if they can figure out my budget they can charge me more than someone else (deeper pockets).
For commodity products, I agree that that kind of pricing is annoying, but I also agree with the parent's sentiments. At half a million dollars, you're not talking a simple sign-the-credit-card purchase, you're negotiating a deal. And putting a reference price up there doesn't help the vendor in deal-making. The other problem is that putting your price on the internet exposes your pricing structure to your competitors and potential competitors, which is in the consumer's interest, but not in the company's interest (especially in the newer stages of product development and sales). Why should a business provide its competitors with a roadmap?
And yes, the sales guys want you on their lead lists - so they can show the CEO how many sales calls they've made and leads they generated. That's how they make their living. When you're talking 10's or 100's of thousands of dollars, that's legit. When you're talking $25, it's pretty aggravating.
OS brands aside, one system admin has the power to completely restructure the IT infrastructure in a huge, multinational accounting firm with no prior approval? This may be a good report for Open Source, but for PWC, it is a bit embarassing, IMHO.
Probably true, though an overly centralized IT process can have its drawbacks, too. What's more suprising than anything is that he told Computerworld about it. I wouldn't really want to have my company's infrastructure of any sort discussed in an helter-skelter way, subject to second-guessing by investors and clients.
The phrase "one domain controller" tells me that this is not a large environment.
An "office within an office" is a suprisingly common arrangement, and for non-enterprise systems may in fact be a good way to do things. If the "satellite" office is close to an independent operation, why not just enable the enterprise apps through a secure web interface or Citrix, and then let the sysadmins run the LAN on their own?
And all this without resorting to an overly-expensive (not that VW is cheap, mind), overly-complex, not-so-safe-for-emergency-workers hybrid.
Even accepting the somewhat exaggerated claims at face value, this brings me to a different conclusion: Electric cars for commuting
Electric engines are several times more efficient than combustion engines in creating motion. They are also quiet, and have no on-site emissions. The technology is not at all complex, and engine power can be easily added (just plug in more batteries and step up the voltage). We already have a very nifty electrical power distribution system, and electricity is a very effective way to distribute and carry around energy. Why work with multiple parallel distribution systems for energy? And if we every figure out emission-less fuel cells, just plug them in as a power source for the existing electric engine (viva la modularity). For commuting situations, where people drive, then park all day, all that's needed is some investment in the last 10 yards. Nothing overly complex, no relying on engineering miracles, just simple separation of tasks.
I wouldn't be surprised either. One of the most striking things about the screenshots is how MS seems to have fallen into the KDE/Gnome trap of changing button themes, adding & subtracting transparency, tweaking position of widgets on the screen, and so forth, without making any substantial changes to the user interaction paradigm:
Mouse to Corner -> Start Menu -> Click on Icon to Run Program
Click on Browser Icon -> Click on Link or Address Bar -> Navigate Page
Click on taskbar item -> Retrieve application window -> Work with application
I'm not naive enough to demand that either Windows or KDGnome implement revolutionary improvements in desktop paradigm - that stuff really seems to happen by accretion, especially since we seem to be on a plateau for the desktop interface. But I do wonder why we need a new OS for this - especially at $200 a pop. Vista really seems like a service release of XP with its core libraries rewritten for extensibility and stability. Good thing to do, but not a boxed release. Why should I pay for a more performant graphic engine that does nothing new for me? Or a redone version of PDF? A truly integrated file system-database-document-management system probably would have been worth $200 a pop, but in its current incarnation as MS Google Desktop, I'll stick to the download version, thank you.
It's not like there's a lack of interesting things to do, either:
Aforementioned document management system, even without the enterprise database filesystem. Just generating a map and TOC of all the docs on the machine would be incredibly useful, not to mention some basic versioning.
"Save to cloud" universal data storage. MS could well have built Freenet in 5 years.
Save and restore state from machine to machine
Functional, user controllable password management (peer-to-peer Passport)
and many more...
If you read those articles about Ballmer "realizing" that MS needs more frequent releases of their OS, it's because they've accepted that companies are not going to upgrade Windows or Office on their present machines, but they will migrate over 3-5 years no matter what - new machines will ship with Vista licenses rather than XP, and eventually it will be easier to just replace the old machines with Vista machines than deal with the "legacy" OS. MS will have a tasty revenue stream from Vista no matter what, because it will still ship with every new machine sold. Enviable business position.
I hope companies and OEMs will realize that if they pressure MS with the threat of breaking ranks for KDGnomeJavaFireLinux, they can repurpose their "OEM" XP licenses to new machines, and get Vista for free or very little. There's got to be a limit to the number of times people can be sold the same product.
I know I sound like every other M$ $uxor/. wanker, but Vista really does seem to be an empty release, and I resent that I'll be obligated to buy it. Somebody, anybody, prove me wrong, or speed up the release of GoogleOS, please!
Microsoft's main effort has always been to block open standards and instead drive integration with their OS.
Kerberos: was free, now extended into Active Directory and Windows Authentication so you cannot use Kerberos as a way to authenticate under Windows.
Websites you can use from any OS - were free under Netscape before IE was bundled with Windows and Netscape snuffed out, now many sites require IE and ActiveX to use, thereby precluding using browser + Java as a desktop OS.
Java applets - free functionality when your JVM ran them properly, after Microsoft's crippled JVM broke them, no longer free.
That list doesn't even mention its attempts to commandeer the SOAP and WSDL standards, block sales of dual-boot machines, obfuscate SMB protocols, etc.
And if you compare how the price of a DVD player has dropped with commoditization versus the price of a productivity suite (which by all accounts ought to be commoditized), you'll be substantially less impressed with its "new, low" pricing.
Microsoft has made some really good software in its lifetime. Excel, for example, has been head and shoulders above other spreadsheets for nearly a decade. When IE5 came out, it broke a lot of new ground. SQL Server has matured into a credible mid-market database server with a thorough set of tools. And there's no doubt that the/. crowd will always pooh-pooh Microsoft's work in providing a standardized UI and set of network management tools.
But the company's basic business strategy is unquestionably built around its Windows and Office monopolies, and sometimes this involves anticompetitive behavior. At the time IE was both released for free and integrated into Windows, Microsoft was also "cutting off Netscape's air supply" with OEMs and crippling Java. So free isn't exactly free with Microsoft.
Well put. However, here's a question that complements that approach:
Is there such as thing as (criminal) professional negligence in coding, no matter who you work for and under what process? Akin to a trucker driving drunk or a power company repair person leaving a 2500 volt wire on the street? If so, what are those?
Good liability law should cover both institutions and people. For the most part, the instutitions should be responsible (and liable) for ensuring good quality. But there should also be a fundamental line where individuals also have a responsibility. Where is that line?
Ah, the ever-present in-the-DB versus in-the-app design debate. I guess I just don't understand the tradeoffs that well, because the subject seems pretty straightforward to me: Keep as much logic in your app as you can get away with.
As I understand Hibernate and ORM's in general (and I'm still relatively new to them), they're basically just an automated way to implement and populate objects within your application that represent the "API" exposed by your database. So if the current database "library" isn't adequate performance-wise, you can just rework the API and hook Hibernate up to views and stored proces instead of tables. In other words, you can put just enough logic in the db to solve your problems. Yes, you're no longer totally compatible with all databases, but you're also not totally dependent on one RDBMS's syntax and features. IMO, translating basic, plain-jane stored procs across DBs isn't all that hard (sorta like going from C to Perl to PHP). When you get to fancy nesting and joining it's a different story altogether....
6) When do I get to mix objects in PHP, Perl, C, and Java into a single codebase? PHP is my language of choice for most of my work, but sometimes I'd just LOVE to something in C to get some improved performance, or maybe take a perl class and access it directly from PHP... Since there's not a standards organization everybody pays any attention to, this kind of functionality just won't happen anytime soon...
That was Microsoft's idea with the.NET CLR. We'll see whether it turned out to be a good idea or not. In Microsoft's case I think this was not unlike KDE's java-bindings, perl bindings, etc, where the languages are really working around the functionality provided by the toolkit. As for a general purpose multi-language compiler - what's the point? For people or machines to make sense of what you've done you need to be writing against a specified language. Why not just make it easier and faster to convert code from one language to another. GCC is getting pretty decent support in this department.
7) When will I be able to mix/match objects? Why can't I instantiate a software object in C or PHP on a remote system, such that the object occupies memory on THAT system instead of THIS one, and have it all work? Why can't we have a "network aware" process model?
Patience, we're getting there. Web services are a good step in that direction, but being able to transfer a state across machines transparently is an order of magnitude increase in complexity, that requires support from everything from the OS to the compiler to the network.
Your questions are good though. Here are some more in that vein: When will I be able to write self-testing, self-healing programs? Why isn't there a smartphone/wireless-PDA-phone-MP3-camera thingamajiggy that automatically stores all data to a secure location on the internet. And costs less than $150. When will my computer do my grocery shopping for me? Or brush my teeth?
Of course you can embed a BSD-licensed DB into a GPL project - the BSD license permits that, along with everything else.
The point is this: Postgres has existed much longer than MySQL. Yet as the OSS, and particularly GPL, movement caught on, and a large number of OSS apps were produced, MySQL managed to be included in many of them, and Postgres and Firebird did not. I don't really think all that many people sat down and evaluated Postgres vs. MySQL - they just learned about MySQL, heard that it was GPL (a Good Thing), and built their GPL app on it. Had Postgres been easier to set up in those days, would people have used it? I don't know, and nobody can, but I'd guess that MySQL being GPL helped propel it to prominence when Linux was really taking off, and the rest of its success is largely network effects. Given how many shortcomings it had and has, why else would people have preferred it over a more feature-complete BSD-licensed database?
I recall reading a while back in MySQL license FAQ that "distribute" includes distributing within an organization as well as outside of it. And since any database application is by nature designed to be used by multiple users, the "don't distribute" basically means "fool around with".
The bottom line is that MySQL's licensing policy is, by design, GPL/OSS your code or pay us. Which is a perfectly valid stance to take, but that also means that for anyone developing in a commercial context where retaing rights to and control of your code has to be on the table, at least at the outset, MySQL is competing on price and features, and that's a whole different ball of wax. It also means that you have to be careful with any apps built on MySQL, as customizations to those apps may incur a requirement to buy a MySQL license.
Let's just be clear that that there's not all that much freedom: any non-GPL (or similar OSS) use is pay for play. Which is an awful lot like most other DB vendors out there.
MySQL is a great example of how the GPL can motivate the use of a product. Because MySQL was one of the earliest DBMS to go GPL, it got embedded into a huge number of GPL applications, and developed the wide range of users that has made getting answers, documentation, tutorials, discussion, etc much easier than its BSD-licensed counterpart. Same phenomenon as Linux and *BSD. Is Linux "better" than *BSD? Who knows, but it's so much more widely used that it's a lot easier to get into it. This is roughly the same reason Windows people run SQL Server.
I run Postgres here at work, and I think it's a fantastic database. In particular, it's well suited for anything science-like because its whole workings are there to see, from indexing algorithms to writing of aggregates to storage choices. It is reputed to get a bit slow on SELECTS when it has huge amounts of data (MVCC giveth and taketh away), but given how much any database's peformance depends on smart indexing, I'd take individual claims of snailesque performance with a dose of salt.
Overall, MySQL's development is great for OSS in general. If you get started, and it doesn't do what you need, you're likely familiar enough with how OSS works to move to Postgres. It also puts price pressure on everyone, which makes more tools available to more developers (part of the point of OSS in the first place).
Having to dump to a script is both a blessing and curse. For any database that dumps to less than the size of a CD, it's actually very portable, and allows you to clean up your database with substantially more ease than a binary format. The curse of course is that you can't just reattach your binary backup and have the database go again. Also, since 8.0, Postgres has had a binary backup format, and has done a thorough job resolving dependencies (a really nuisance in 7.x).
It is both correct and enlightening to note that global warming is not the principal cause of the increase in hurricanes. However, there are two reasons to put the two subjects together:
1) The "several-decade cycle" the NYT refers to is called the North Atlantic Oscillation (its counterpart is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation), and last I checked its mechanisms were largely not understood - it's merely been registered as a long-term cycle in climate measurements. There are quite a few plausible ways the global heating could drive this cycle or alter it. For example, if global warming shuts off the Gulf Stream and the "conveyor belt", surface waters in the tropical and subtropical North Atlantic could be heated substantial more quickly than via the NAO with the "conveyor belt" active.
Although the NAO is a natural mode of atmospheric variability,
surface (ocean and land), stratospheric, or even anthropogenic processes may influence its phase and amplitude. At present, there is no consensus on the process or processes that are responsible for observed low-frequency variations in the NAO. The absence of a demonstrated skillful predictive model leaves us with significant uncertainty about NAO variability in the future. The proposed response to increased greenhouse gas concentrations through forcing from warmer tropical SSTs (27) or a strengthened stratospheric vortex (28) implies, however, that the positive index phase might continue.
2) In an infrastructure sense, it seems quite likely that the effect of global warming will be to produce climate change at an increasingly rapid pace. So Katrina is an object lesson both in being ready to adapt infrastructure to changing climate conditions (in this case, the onset of a hurricane-friendly NAO mode), as well the rapid pace at which these changes can occur.
So while it's probably an exaggeration to finger global warming for Katrina, it's not quite "ignoring the bulk of available data", and it's not a bad way to approach future scenarios.
University courses are supposed to be about learning because you want to know and understand.
I'd go further than that. University is about learning to think: to analyze, to learn various types of thinking and appraoches to the world, to put things in a broader perspective, and to communicate. IMO anyone leaving college should have had two semesters of solid writing experience - no employer will ever ask you about writing and communication, but it underpins any successful career development. If you can't explain your ideas, they will always take second place to the ideas of those can explain them.
Unfortunately, university is also about the only time in your life when you have the liberty to learn to just think. Barring a plum job or a stint in academia, you will have very little time to learn to think other than college.
That's not to say that a lot of university curricula couldn't use a little more thought about what skills and methods of learning a student is likely to need, not to mention a good structured program for giving students experience before they graduate. But I'd be awfully wary of vocationally focused programs that throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Hmmm.... What percentage of web servers run Linux?
What percentage of DMZ hosts run Linux? What percentage of closed email relays run Linux? THese are all mainstream IT environments and Linux is quite capable there.
All good points. The ZDNet article had another good point buried in it - to get the most out of OSS, you need to be developing something. When you look there, you see a huge effect. Say you're writing some kind of improvement or integration for existing software. Any dev worth his/her salt should at least know what kind of OSS is out there that addresses the need.
Also, I think Gartner tends to overlook the segment of the market when OSS is most important - small and microenterprise, and research. In this areas, Linux is a breath of fresh air. You can now assemble almost any system and make it work for somewhere between 10 and 500 people for the cost of hardware and some man-hours (which are substantially less of an issue with an IT department of.5 - 3 people). Of course a big enterprise is gonna have trouble if they wholesale migrate IT - just like they would have a lot of problems if they wholesale migrate all the manufacturing equipment they've bought, moved from shipping via rail to running a fleet of trucks?
I think the better way of describing the phenomenon Gartner is encapsulating is that almost any infrastructure move you make, of any type, better promise a huge difference in cost or performance, or something, or else you're probably better off just working with what you've got. Of course this being Gartner, they have to package it some more catchy way to act like it's more than just a simple roundup of some people's experiences.
First of all, water is the major greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
This is absolutely true, though in the emissions sense it is more or less irrelevant because it's not a lever we can move.
Second, in terms of energy efficiency, the power stations are FAR more efficient than automobiles. If we're able to tap the energy from those stations for use in vehicles through electric cars, hydrogen cells, or some other method, it will be better than the localized burning of fuels in cars and trucks.
Absolutely agreed, provided that the overall environmental damage from production at the power plant can be minimized. Oil's main advantage is that it's a convenient way to carry pre-made energy around. Electricity is an (nearly) equally convenient way to carry energy around, and there are far better ways to condense and minimize contamination than with oil. Furthermore, we already have a thorough electrical infrastructure built up. And, as everyone points out, you have your choice of ways to make electricity, whereas making oil is still extremely difficult.
It surprises me that nobody has brought up the viability of electric cars. They are quiet and efficient, and you can put in as much power as you like in without affecting noise or emissions. The only thing an electric car cannot presently do is travel hundreds of miles, which describes the vast majority of trips people take in their cars. And since electric motors are vastly more efficient than internal combustion engines, you don't take any double hit from turning the electricity back into chemical energy, and you can use some of that efficiency for power rather than conservation (let's be realistic, people LOVE powerful cars) without smogging up the world any more.
Maybe I'm living in a cave, but I just don't get why auto makers can't build truly gas-electric cars (rather than battery-supplemented gas cars) - ones that run a battery-based, wall-charged engine for all but the longest trips.
I think this is really a critical issue. I guess I'd take the "quality-based" approach to this, which might be a bit bureaucratic but would allow for some flexibility:
Municipalities or regions with substantial disaster risks must prove (in advance) that they are capable of managing the event. This would involve verification via fire drill type response on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis (which would help reduce the chaos and mistrust that hamper response). If the local government cannot meet the standard, FEMA takes over directing operations. Something like that...
OK, kudos for brokering honest debate. I'm a flaming liberal and have nothing but contempt for the way Bush and his underqualified appointees in FEMA have handled this, but fairness dictates noting that New Orleans and its levees have been underfunded for at least 20 years, so a fair number of different administrations have a hand in this underfunding.
However, I do think there are several lessons. One is that we need to chart a balanced course with respect to FEMA. No, we should not spend money on projects which require ever-increasing investments to keep natural changes from destroying them. But we must to have a serious effort at lots of levels of government to prevent and mitigate disaster, and that takes earnest money. In this case, as you point out, that would have at least included prompt and effective evacuation, as well as some plan for getting the water out which does not thoroughly poison the Gulf.
That balance requires finding a way to scale back government projects in some other manner than "starving the beast". I admire your willingness to stick to fiscal conservative guns at this kind of time. I just want to know that people will have an open debate about the real pros and cons of cutting government.
No one that lives in New Orleans should have been bussed to the Superdome! The same buses that took people to the Superdome should have taken them out of the city to shelters outside the flood zone.
Volume flow: to move the same number of people 10 times further in approximately the same amount of time, you need 10 times more moving capacity.
The lack of police, food, water, and medical care in the Superdome was the fault of the Mayor of the city and the Governor of the state.
Mightn't it have just a little bitty bit to do with so much of the National Guard being over in Iraq, and with FEMA being run by a group of Bush campaign workers (read their bios) with no disaster management experience?
For Pete's sake, this kind of thing is exactly FEMA's mandate: provide resources to avert and mitigate emergencies. In other words, FEMA should have had the place crawling with responders and National Guardsmen the moment the state of emergency was declared on August 26th. I'll bet you 25 bucks that the head of the agency not only keeps his job but gets a raise. Seriously, I'll make that bet.
I say this and I'm one of the people who thinks that FEMA is way too quick to offer people money to rebuild their waterfront condos every time a flood or hurricane happens. But when push comes to shove, it is our nation and our government's responsibility to avoid the kind of human tragedy that happened in New Orleans, and that job primarily belongs to FEMA.
The simple reason people get started with MySQL is that it's popular. So there are more tutorials on how to get started, more books, more widgets and wizbangs that work with MySQL, etc. This also means there is a larger network of people to answer questions.
Contrary to popular opinion however, Postgres is now extremely easy to install and administer, either on Windows or *nix, has excellent resource use (i.e., on my Windows box, it's much more lightweight than MySQL), and it has an GUI admin tool right in the box. And because of its liberal licensing scheme (BSD), you can use it for anything you like. What of that makes it hard for ISPs to run Postgres? The only hard thing I can think of is finding people who know it.
I'll concede that postgres' user model is rather limited, but this is slated for substantial improvement (conversion to roles) in version 8.1 now in beta.
Postgres really has a rather extraordinary feature set: what other DBMS (open or closed source) has Perl and Ruby procedural languages (PL/Ruby), or an (admittedly incomplete) statistical procedure language (PL/R), custom aggregrates, Kerberos authentication? And in my experience you have all that stuff there if you need it (which as you correctly point out, most simple database driven pages do not), but it does get in your way when you don't use it, and it's there for you to grow with when you want it.
For some reason I cannot understand, people like you want to reduce the argument to a "We know it will happen" vs. "We know it won't happen" argument. Unfortunately, neither is true. We don't know what will happen in the next hundred years or so, we know what might happen. The Earth's climate depends on a number of factors, CO2 is only one of many.
"We didn't know everything then" is gonna be cold comfort in 50 years when we realize we could have done a wide variety of things, of varying degres of unpleasantness to hedge our bets against climate change. We know very clearly that greenhouse gases trap heat. Some of these, like CO2 come directly from human activites, while others are may come from other climate effects, some of them (like increased water vapor) from secondary effects, and some from non-anthropogenic changes.
Leaving aside the question of whether we are the primary cause of the current warming trends, it's indisputable that we are pushing a big, big lever by releasing so much CO2 into the atmosphere. And as Hurricane Katrina is so evidently demonstrating, we have built our infrastructure in a way that depends heavily on a very stable climate. So pushing any climate-changing levers at all seems like a pretty bad idea, and something we ought to stop doing. What we should be doing is trying to orient our infrastructure to be less susceptible to risk from changes in climate and resource availability. As for the argument that it will "destroy" the economy - if a hurricane does a nice job of destroying a local economy, think about what changes an order of magnitude larger geographically and possibly in magnitude can do. And there's no consensus among economists that changes to reduce emissions will be all that bad for the economy. If there's unpredictable risk on either side, how is doing nothing the safe or wise alternative?
Oil used for transportation is the largest (or damn close) source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and it's clear that we will not be able to find enough oil to meet demand for transportation for much more than a decade, 15 years tops. Since a tight oil market is associated not only with rising prices but extreme price volatility (again nicely illustrated by Katrina), there will be economic woes coming from oil anyway, so we might as well take our medicine a bit earlier and at great dosage than we absolutely are forced to, and move our infrastructure off of oil. That may or may not the most advantageous economic move in the short term, but it staves off a demonstrably large risk of far worse consequences later.
That means, for example, putting in place fuel efficiency standards that discourage making fuel-inefficient vehicles. Yes, I know American automakers say their can't get the magic potion that the Japanese have that lets them think about making more fuel-efficient cars, and consumers are snapping up SUVs, but as energy costs go up, an automaker stuck on making SUVs will be royally screwed. That's bad stewardship of a company. Not only that, but since Americans are uniquely invested in using their cars to get everywhere, just about all Americans will be royally screwed by it too. That's bad stewardship of an economy. The Bush administration made a lot of noise about how Kyoto was designed to "hurt America". Even if that were so (which I distinctly disbelieve), he claimed he was going to introduce alternate measures to reduce emissions? What has he done? That's asking for accountability. Our country is being exposed to a big risk, and the president is derelict in his duty to address it.
No, there's not a hundred percent certainty that the current scientific view of climate change will turn out to be correct. But it is clear scientifically there's a lot more risk in doing what we're doing now than doing something different.
While I appreciate your clever use of basic physics, perhaps you might allow some room for the idea that the earth is not completely described by the science you learned in high school.
One important phenomenon, as described excellently by another poster in this thread, is the the fact that ice is much fresher than ocean water, so the overall density of the ocean will (most likely) go down, and voile, sea level rises.
The second, as others have also elegantly pointed out, is that much ice is not currently displacing any water, so 100% the effect of its melting is to increase sea level.
There are non-sea level issues of vast importance as well. Even simple climate models show vast sensitivity to overall earth albedo (reflectivity) and they all show a feedback loop with accelerating warming when a substantive amount of polar ice is loss. The fact that we're seeing this melting now is pretty strong clue that warming is going to speed up.
Also of great importance is the contribution of this new fresh water (and thanks to decreased albedo a great deal more heat absorbed by the earth) to the hydrologic cycle, as water vapor is also an important greenhouse gas. If the melted ice becomes water vapor, you can expect - again - increased rates of heating.
And yes, the poles get less heat from the sun than does the equator - the transport of that heat is the ultimate source of all weather patterns. So a substantial change in that heat balance can cause vast disruptions in weather patterns. In addition the potential shutoff of the Gulf Stream and general thermohaline circulation, there are potential movements of large high and low-pressure patterns that can bring intense droughts and flooding to numerous places, in the same way that El Nino does. And since climate systems are strongly nonlinear, it's very hard to predict where and when those events might occur. The effect could be anything from a little more sun in places to life-threating droughts. Put it this way: if something like the North Atlantic Oscillation can set conditions for a devastating hurricane season in the tropical Atlantic (as we're poised to get), imagine what a climate change several orders of magnitude larger could involve.
You can argue all you like about whether these changes are majority anthropogenic or not, but it is indisputable that our carbon-loading of the atmosphere is like pressing hard on the accelerator when you're going down a steep incline. Carbon dioxide content is a big, big, lever for global climate, and I'm hard pressed to see value of taking the Wile E. Coyote approach to dealing with this particular change in our world.
It's definitely about time. The key thing the movies need to change is stop coasting on the same old movie as its own reason to come to the theater, because it ain't anymore, and especially not for $10 a head. People (including myself) gladly pay $30 and upwards to see a good play. Why? Basically because the experience is memorable, elegant (speaks well of you on a date), and thought-provoking. Even if the movies were only $5 now, I wouldn't really go more - who wants to hustle out there, get in line, and deal with finding a seat, just to sit in the dark essentially by yourself.
Movie theaters needs to shoot for something distinct and memorable, because the lower end of the market: low-key evening in, casual, don't want to think about it is completely sewed up at home, and would continue to be, even if the price of a movie rental doubled. Theater movies need to try things like an intermission, a lounge, a forum to meet other moviegoers, plus of course, movies that you can actually get into and enjoy, anything to get you re-connected to the movies as a social event.
What he really means is "I can't get top engineers so I can't innovate as much". But that doesn't mean innovation is not occuring. And how are we to be sure innovation at that company would have been as skillfully executed or as good for the industry as it might be at Google.
Totally agreed. Not only that, but a) Google's got it's own cheddar, so the VCs still have to spend their money somewhere, and b) having a big corporation ready to acquire startups is overall a great thing for the ecosystem - it gives VCs their exit strategy from the getgo.
Plus, I'm not really seeing a lot of innovation in inventing some cool web-driven whizbang - it doesn't really change how people live that much as opening the first e-commerce site, or building out the corporate network for example. I mean I love blogs and blogging (obviously), and I do think there's good opportunities in taking it corporate, but c'mon, is it really that grand an innovation?
You can already get a Microsoft.Windows.NET.Passport for IM=email address=username, or Yahoo or AOL, none of whom seems to have acheived Windows-esque domination with it. Yahoo uses that combination to drive traffic to their own content, which they then use to sell ads. So it's not an empty market by any means. And allowing IM services to talk to one another has no bearing on whether Google starts a new one.
How is Google Talk different from what's out there?
Slashdot Mirror
And yes, the sales guys want you on their lead lists - so they can show the CEO how many sales calls they've made and leads they generated. That's how they make their living. When you're talking 10's or 100's of thousands of dollars, that's legit. When you're talking $25, it's pretty aggravating.
An "office within an office" is a suprisingly common arrangement, and for non-enterprise systems may in fact be a good way to do things. If the "satellite" office is close to an independent operation, why not just enable the enterprise apps through a secure web interface or Citrix, and then let the sysadmins run the LAN on their own?
Electric cars for commuting
Electric engines are several times more efficient than combustion engines in creating motion. They are also quiet, and have no on-site emissions. The technology is not at all complex, and engine power can be easily added (just plug in more batteries and step up the voltage). We already have a very nifty electrical power distribution system, and electricity is a very effective way to distribute and carry around energy. Why work with multiple parallel distribution systems for energy? And if we every figure out emission-less fuel cells, just plug them in as a power source for the existing electric engine (viva la modularity). For commuting situations, where people drive, then park all day, all that's needed is some investment in the last 10 yards. Nothing overly complex, no relying on engineering miracles, just simple separation of tasks.
I'm not naive enough to demand that either Windows or KDGnome implement revolutionary improvements in desktop paradigm - that stuff really seems to happen by accretion, especially since we seem to be on a plateau for the desktop interface. But I do wonder why we need a new OS for this - especially at $200 a pop. Vista really seems like a service release of XP with its core libraries rewritten for extensibility and stability. Good thing to do, but not a boxed release. Why should I pay for a more performant graphic engine that does nothing new for me? Or a redone version of PDF? A truly integrated file system-database-document-management system probably would have been worth $200 a pop, but in its current incarnation as MS Google Desktop, I'll stick to the download version, thank you.
It's not like there's a lack of interesting things to do, either:
If you read those articles about Ballmer "realizing" that MS needs more frequent releases of their OS, it's because they've accepted that companies are not going to upgrade Windows or Office on their present machines, but they will migrate over 3-5 years no matter what - new machines will ship with Vista licenses rather than XP, and eventually it will be easier to just replace the old machines with Vista machines than deal with the "legacy" OS. MS will have a tasty revenue stream from Vista no matter what, because it will still ship with every new machine sold. Enviable business position.
I hope companies and OEMs will realize that if they pressure MS with the threat of breaking ranks for KDGnomeJavaFireLinux, they can repurpose their "OEM" XP licenses to new machines, and get Vista for free or very little. There's got to be a limit to the number of times people can be sold the same product.
I know I sound like every other M$ $uxor
Microsoft's main effort has always been to block open standards and instead drive integration with their OS.
/. crowd will always pooh-pooh Microsoft's work in providing a standardized UI and set of network management tools.
Kerberos: was free, now extended into Active Directory and Windows Authentication so you cannot use Kerberos as a way to authenticate under Windows.
Websites you can use from any OS - were free under Netscape before IE was bundled with Windows and Netscape snuffed out, now many sites require IE and ActiveX to use, thereby precluding using browser + Java as a desktop OS.
Java applets - free functionality when your JVM ran them properly, after Microsoft's crippled JVM broke them, no longer free.
That list doesn't even mention its attempts to commandeer the SOAP and WSDL standards, block sales of dual-boot machines, obfuscate SMB protocols, etc.
And if you compare how the price of a DVD player has dropped with commoditization versus the price of a productivity suite (which by all accounts ought to be commoditized), you'll be substantially less impressed with its "new, low" pricing.
Microsoft has made some really good software in its lifetime. Excel, for example, has been head and shoulders above other spreadsheets for nearly a decade. When IE5 came out, it broke a lot of new ground. SQL Server has matured into a credible mid-market database server with a thorough set of tools. And there's no doubt that the
But the company's basic business strategy is unquestionably built around its Windows and Office monopolies, and sometimes this involves anticompetitive behavior. At the time IE was both released for free and integrated into Windows, Microsoft was also "cutting off Netscape's air supply" with OEMs and crippling Java. So free isn't exactly free with Microsoft.
Well put. However, here's a question that complements that approach:
Is there such as thing as (criminal) professional negligence in coding, no matter who you work for and under what process? Akin to a trucker driving drunk or a power company repair person leaving a 2500 volt wire on the street? If so, what are those?
Good liability law should cover both institutions and people. For the most part, the instutitions should be responsible (and liable) for ensuring good quality. But there should also be a fundamental line where individuals also have a responsibility. Where is that line?
Ah, the ever-present in-the-DB versus in-the-app design debate. I guess I just don't understand the tradeoffs that well, because the subject seems pretty straightforward to me:
Keep as much logic in your app as you can get away with.
As I understand Hibernate and ORM's in general (and I'm still relatively new to them), they're basically just an automated way to implement and populate objects within your application that represent the "API" exposed by your database. So if the current database "library" isn't adequate performance-wise, you can just rework the API and hook Hibernate up to views and stored proces instead of tables. In other words, you can put just enough logic in the db to solve your problems. Yes, you're no longer totally compatible with all databases, but you're also not totally dependent on one RDBMS's syntax and features. IMO, translating basic, plain-jane stored procs across DBs isn't all that hard (sorta like going from C to Perl to PHP). When you get to fancy nesting and joining it's a different story altogether....
Patience, we're getting there. Web services are a good step in that direction, but being able to transfer a state across machines transparently is an order of magnitude increase in complexity, that requires support from everything from the OS to the compiler to the network.
Your questions are good though. Here are some more in that vein: When will I be able to write self-testing, self-healing programs? Why isn't there a smartphone/wireless-PDA-phone-MP3-camera thingamajiggy that automatically stores all data to a secure location on the internet. And costs less than $150. When will my computer do my grocery shopping for me? Or brush my teeth?
Of course you can embed a BSD-licensed DB into a GPL project - the BSD license permits that, along with everything else.
The point is this: Postgres has existed much longer than MySQL. Yet as the OSS, and particularly GPL, movement caught on, and a large number of OSS apps were produced, MySQL managed to be included in many of them, and Postgres and Firebird did not. I don't really think all that many people sat down and evaluated Postgres vs. MySQL - they just learned about MySQL, heard that it was GPL (a Good Thing), and built their GPL app on it. Had Postgres been easier to set up in those days, would people have used it? I don't know, and nobody can, but I'd guess that MySQL being GPL helped propel it to prominence when Linux was really taking off, and the rest of its success is largely network effects. Given how many shortcomings it had and has, why else would people have preferred it over a more feature-complete BSD-licensed database?
You italicized the right word.
I recall reading a while back in MySQL license FAQ that "distribute" includes distributing within an organization as well as outside of it. And since any database application is by nature designed to be used by multiple users, the "don't distribute" basically means "fool around with".
The bottom line is that MySQL's licensing policy is, by design, GPL/OSS your code or pay us. Which is a perfectly valid stance to take, but that also means that for anyone developing in a commercial context where retaing rights to and control of your code has to be on the table, at least at the outset, MySQL is competing on price and features, and that's a whole different ball of wax. It also means that you have to be careful with any apps built on MySQL, as customizations to those apps may incur a requirement to buy a MySQL license.
Let's just be clear that that there's not all that much freedom: any non-GPL (or similar OSS) use is pay for play. Which is an awful lot like most other DB vendors out there.
User community, user community, user community.
MySQL is a great example of how the GPL can motivate the use of a product. Because MySQL was one of the earliest DBMS to go GPL, it got embedded into a huge number of GPL applications, and developed the wide range of users that has made getting answers, documentation, tutorials, discussion, etc much easier than its BSD-licensed counterpart. Same phenomenon as Linux and *BSD. Is Linux "better" than *BSD? Who knows, but it's so much more widely used that it's a lot easier to get into it. This is roughly the same reason Windows people run SQL Server.
I run Postgres here at work, and I think it's a fantastic database. In particular, it's well suited for anything science-like because its whole workings are there to see, from indexing algorithms to writing of aggregates to storage choices. It is reputed to get a bit slow on SELECTS when it has huge amounts of data (MVCC giveth and taketh away), but given how much any database's peformance depends on smart indexing, I'd take individual claims of snailesque performance with a dose of salt.
Overall, MySQL's development is great for OSS in general. If you get started, and it doesn't do what you need, you're likely familiar enough with how OSS works to move to Postgres. It also puts price pressure on everyone, which makes more tools available to more developers (part of the point of OSS in the first place).
Having to dump to a script is both a blessing and curse. For any database that dumps to less than the size of a CD, it's actually very portable, and allows you to clean up your database with substantially more ease than a binary format. The curse of course is that you can't just reattach your binary backup and have the database go again. Also, since 8.0, Postgres has had a binary backup format, and has done a thorough job resolving dependencies (a really nuisance in 7.x).
1) The "several-decade cycle" the NYT refers to is called the North Atlantic Oscillation (its counterpart is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation), and last I checked its mechanisms were largely not understood - it's merely been registered as a long-term cycle in climate measurements. There are quite a few plausible ways the global heating could drive this cycle or alter it. For example, if global warming shuts off the Gulf Stream and the "conveyor belt", surface waters in the tropical and subtropical North Atlantic could be heated substantial more quickly than via the NAO with the "conveyor belt" active.
For example, from http://www.columbia.edu/~lmp/paps/visbeck-etal-PN
2) In an infrastructure sense, it seems quite likely that the effect of global warming will be to produce climate change at an increasingly rapid pace. So Katrina is an object lesson both in being ready to adapt infrastructure to changing climate conditions (in this case, the onset of a hurricane-friendly NAO mode), as well the rapid pace at which these changes can occur.
So while it's probably an exaggeration to finger global warming for Katrina, it's not quite "ignoring the bulk of available data", and it's not a bad way to approach future scenarios.
Unfortunately, university is also about the only time in your life when you have the liberty to learn to just think. Barring a plum job or a stint in academia, you will have very little time to learn to think other than college.
That's not to say that a lot of university curricula couldn't use a little more thought about what skills and methods of learning a student is likely to need, not to mention a good structured program for giving students experience before they graduate. But I'd be awfully wary of vocationally focused programs that throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Also, I think Gartner tends to overlook the segment of the market when OSS is most important - small and microenterprise, and research. In this areas, Linux is a breath of fresh air. You can now assemble almost any system and make it work for somewhere between 10 and 500 people for the cost of hardware and some man-hours (which are substantially less of an issue with an IT department of
I think the better way of describing the phenomenon Gartner is encapsulating is that almost any infrastructure move you make, of any type, better promise a huge difference in cost or performance, or something, or else you're probably better off just working with what you've got. Of course this being Gartner, they have to package it some more catchy way to act like it's more than just a simple roundup of some people's experiences.
Absolutely agreed, provided that the overall environmental damage from production at the power plant can be minimized. Oil's main advantage is that it's a convenient way to carry pre-made energy around. Electricity is an (nearly) equally convenient way to carry energy around, and there are far better ways to condense and minimize contamination than with oil. Furthermore, we already have a thorough electrical infrastructure built up. And, as everyone points out, you have your choice of ways to make electricity, whereas making oil is still extremely difficult.
It surprises me that nobody has brought up the viability of electric cars. They are quiet and efficient, and you can put in as much power as you like in without affecting noise or emissions. The only thing an electric car cannot presently do is travel hundreds of miles, which describes the vast majority of trips people take in their cars. And since electric motors are vastly more efficient than internal combustion engines, you don't take any double hit from turning the electricity back into chemical energy, and you can use some of that efficiency for power rather than conservation (let's be realistic, people LOVE powerful cars) without smogging up the world any more.
Maybe I'm living in a cave, but I just don't get why auto makers can't build truly gas-electric cars (rather than battery-supplemented gas cars) - ones that run a battery-based, wall-charged engine for all but the longest trips.
I think this is really a critical issue. I guess I'd take the "quality-based" approach to this, which might be a bit bureaucratic but would allow for some flexibility:
Municipalities or regions with substantial disaster risks must prove (in advance) that they are capable of managing the event. This would involve verification via fire drill type response on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis (which would help reduce the chaos and mistrust that hamper response). If the local government cannot meet the standard, FEMA takes over directing operations. Something like that...
OK, kudos for brokering honest debate. I'm a flaming liberal and have nothing but contempt for the way Bush and his underqualified appointees in FEMA have handled this, but fairness dictates noting that New Orleans and its levees have been underfunded for at least 20 years, so a fair number of different administrations have a hand in this underfunding.
However, I do think there are several lessons. One is that we need to chart a balanced course with respect to FEMA. No, we should not spend money on projects which require ever-increasing investments to keep natural changes from destroying them. But we must to have a serious effort at lots of levels of government to prevent and mitigate disaster, and that takes earnest money. In this case, as you point out, that would have at least included prompt and effective evacuation, as well as some plan for getting the water out which does not thoroughly poison the Gulf.
That balance requires finding a way to scale back government projects in some other manner than "starving the beast". I admire your willingness to stick to fiscal conservative guns at this kind of time. I just want to know that people will have an open debate about the real pros and cons of cutting government.
For Pete's sake, this kind of thing is exactly FEMA's mandate: provide resources to avert and mitigate emergencies. In other words, FEMA should have had the place crawling with responders and National Guardsmen the moment the state of emergency was declared on August 26th. I'll bet you 25 bucks that the head of the agency not only keeps his job but gets a raise. Seriously, I'll make that bet.
I say this and I'm one of the people who thinks that FEMA is way too quick to offer people money to rebuild their waterfront condos every time a flood or hurricane happens. But when push comes to shove, it is our nation and our government's responsibility to avoid the kind of human tragedy that happened in New Orleans, and that job primarily belongs to FEMA.
The simple reason people get started with MySQL is that it's popular. So there are more tutorials on how to get started, more books, more widgets and wizbangs that work with MySQL, etc. This also means there is a larger network of people to answer questions.
Contrary to popular opinion however, Postgres is now extremely easy to install and administer, either on Windows or *nix, has excellent resource use (i.e., on my Windows box, it's much more lightweight than MySQL), and it has an GUI admin tool right in the box. And because of its liberal licensing scheme (BSD), you can use it for anything you like. What of that makes it hard for ISPs to run Postgres? The only hard thing I can think of is finding people who know it.
I'll concede that postgres' user model is rather limited, but this is slated for substantial improvement (conversion to roles) in version 8.1 now in beta.
Postgres really has a rather extraordinary feature set: what other DBMS (open or closed source) has Perl and Ruby procedural languages (PL/Ruby), or an (admittedly incomplete) statistical procedure language (PL/R), custom aggregrates, Kerberos authentication? And in my experience you have all that stuff there if you need it (which as you correctly point out, most simple database driven pages do not), but it does get in your way when you don't use it, and it's there for you to grow with when you want it.
Leaving aside the question of whether we are the primary cause of the current warming trends, it's indisputable that we are pushing a big, big lever by releasing so much CO2 into the atmosphere. And as Hurricane Katrina is so evidently demonstrating, we have built our infrastructure in a way that depends heavily on a very stable climate. So pushing any climate-changing levers at all seems like a pretty bad idea, and something we ought to stop doing. What we should be doing is trying to orient our infrastructure to be less susceptible to risk from changes in climate and resource availability. As for the argument that it will "destroy" the economy - if a hurricane does a nice job of destroying a local economy, think about what changes an order of magnitude larger geographically and possibly in magnitude can do. And there's no consensus among economists that changes to reduce emissions will be all that bad for the economy. If there's unpredictable risk on either side, how is doing nothing the safe or wise alternative?
Oil used for transportation is the largest (or damn close) source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and it's clear that we will not be able to find enough oil to meet demand for transportation for much more than a decade, 15 years tops. Since a tight oil market is associated not only with rising prices but extreme price volatility (again nicely illustrated by Katrina), there will be economic woes coming from oil anyway, so we might as well take our medicine a bit earlier and at great dosage than we absolutely are forced to, and move our infrastructure off of oil. That may or may not the most advantageous economic move in the short term, but it staves off a demonstrably large risk of far worse consequences later.
That means, for example, putting in place fuel efficiency standards that discourage making fuel-inefficient vehicles. Yes, I know American automakers say their can't get the magic potion that the Japanese have that lets them think about making more fuel-efficient cars, and consumers are snapping up SUVs, but as energy costs go up, an automaker stuck on making SUVs will be royally screwed. That's bad stewardship of a company. Not only that, but since Americans are uniquely invested in using their cars to get everywhere, just about all Americans will be royally screwed by it too. That's bad stewardship of an economy. The Bush administration made a lot of noise about how Kyoto was designed to "hurt America". Even if that were so (which I distinctly disbelieve), he claimed he was going to introduce alternate measures to reduce emissions? What has he done? That's asking for accountability. Our country is being exposed to a big risk, and the president is derelict in his duty to address it.
No, there's not a hundred percent certainty that the current scientific view of climate change will turn out to be correct. But it is clear scientifically there's a lot more risk in doing what we're doing now than doing something different.
While I appreciate your clever use of basic physics, perhaps you might allow some room for the idea that the earth is not completely described by the science you learned in high school.
One important phenomenon, as described excellently by another poster in this thread, is the the fact that ice is much fresher than ocean water, so the overall density of the ocean will (most likely) go down, and voile, sea level rises.
The second, as others have also elegantly pointed out, is that much ice is not currently displacing any water, so 100% the effect of its melting is to increase sea level.
There are non-sea level issues of vast importance as well. Even simple climate models show vast sensitivity to overall earth albedo (reflectivity) and they all show a feedback loop with accelerating warming when a substantive amount of polar ice is loss. The fact that we're seeing this melting now is pretty strong clue that warming is going to speed up.
Also of great importance is the contribution of this new fresh water (and thanks to decreased albedo a great deal more heat absorbed by the earth) to the hydrologic cycle, as water vapor is also an important greenhouse gas. If the melted ice becomes water vapor, you can expect - again - increased rates of heating.
And yes, the poles get less heat from the sun than does the equator - the transport of that heat is the ultimate source of all weather patterns. So a substantial change in that heat balance can cause vast disruptions in weather patterns. In addition the potential shutoff of the Gulf Stream and general thermohaline circulation, there are potential movements of large high and low-pressure patterns that can bring intense droughts and flooding to numerous places, in the same way that El Nino does. And since climate systems are strongly nonlinear, it's very hard to predict where and when those events might occur. The effect could be anything from a little more sun in places to life-threating droughts. Put it this way: if something like the North Atlantic Oscillation can set conditions for a devastating hurricane season in the tropical Atlantic (as we're poised to get), imagine what a climate change several orders of magnitude larger could involve.
You can argue all you like about whether these changes are majority anthropogenic or not, but it is indisputable that our carbon-loading of the atmosphere is like pressing hard on the accelerator when you're going down a steep incline. Carbon dioxide content is a big, big, lever for global climate, and I'm hard pressed to see value of taking the Wile E. Coyote approach to dealing with this particular change in our world.
It's definitely about time. The key thing the movies need to change is stop coasting on the same old movie as its own reason to come to the theater, because it ain't anymore, and especially not for $10 a head. People (including myself) gladly pay $30 and upwards to see a good play. Why? Basically because the experience is memorable, elegant (speaks well of you on a date), and thought-provoking. Even if the movies were only $5 now, I wouldn't really go more - who wants to hustle out there, get in line, and deal with finding a seat, just to sit in the dark essentially by yourself.
Movie theaters needs to shoot for something distinct and memorable, because the lower end of the market: low-key evening in, casual, don't want to think about it is completely sewed up at home, and would continue to be, even if the price of a movie rental doubled. Theater movies need to try things like an intermission, a lounge, a forum to meet other moviegoers, plus of course, movies that you can actually get into and enjoy, anything to get you re-connected to the movies as a social event.
Plus, I'm not really seeing a lot of innovation in inventing some cool web-driven whizbang - it doesn't really change how people live that much as opening the first e-commerce site, or building out the corporate network for example. I mean I love blogs and blogging (obviously), and I do think there's good opportunities in taking it corporate, but c'mon, is it really that grand an innovation?
You can already get a Microsoft .Windows .NET .Passport for IM=email address=username, or Yahoo or AOL, none of whom seems to have acheived Windows-esque domination with it. Yahoo uses that combination to drive traffic to their own content, which they then use to sell ads. So it's not an empty market by any means. And allowing IM services to talk to one another has no bearing on whether Google starts a new one.
How is Google Talk different from what's out there?